-The Times of India BHOPAL: Next year on Independence Day, India will have the world's largest 750MW solar power plant in Rewa district of Madhya Pradesh, which will pip America's much-vaunted 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight solar project in California, commissioned four days ago. Acquisition of 1,500 hectares of land for the Rs 4000 crore project is close to completion and government agencies are likely to invite tenders from developers by April. The state...

-The Hindu In the present state of the economy, when there is excess capacity in manufacturing, adequate stocks of foodgrain and the inflation rate is trending downwards, there is an opportune moment for a public investment-centred fiscal expansion Over the past eight months, the government has issued some strong statements on the economy and taken some bold steps aimed at transforming it. As it prepares to present its first real budget we...

-PTI New Delhi: The risk of hunger and malnutrition could increase by 20 per cent due to climate change by 2050, endangering the lives of millions of people, a UN agency has warned. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) says climate change is making disasters, such as floods and droughts, more frequent and intense, land and water more scarce and difficult to access, and increases in agricultural productivity even harder to...

-The Telegraph Guwahati: The Centre today asked Assam to tread the "lab-to-land" route to boost farm output and said an Indian agricultural research institute would be set up in the state. Union agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh said Assam should make optimum use of its soil, which is of the highest quality, on the lines of Pusa (in Bihar where the research institute was incepted in 1905), to boost agricultural output. "Assam has...

-The Indian Express ONE of the late R.K. Laxman's best cartoons from the mid-1960's portrays a smiling food minister looking out of a window at a heavy monsoon downpour saying, "This year we can tell the Americans to go to hell." Fifty years ago, a good monsoon meant that that year, India was not dependent on food aid and wouldn't have to go hat in hand to the Americans for food...